Donatella Di Cesare

In the first stage of her studies, she studied mostly in Germany, firstly at the University of Tübingen, then at Heidelberg, where she was the last student of Gadamer. She worked there on phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics. She offered an original perspective of these two disciplines, which is close to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. Those studies would have been included in many essays published subsequently and two books: Utopia of Understanding, Suny Press, Albany 2013. Gadamer, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2013.

After the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte, she had been working on philosophy's responsibility for the extermination with the book Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks, Polity Press, Cambridge – Boston 2018.

The question about the violence and the human condition victim of extreme violence was an ulterior step in her research. Hence, this more recent field of research is developed thoroughly in the volume Torture, Polity Press, Cambridge – Boston 2018.[1] The political and ethical questions in the era of globalisation have pushed her to investigate the current phenomenon of terror, the dark side of the global civil war. She published Terror and Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge – Boston 2019.

In 2017 it can be observed a political turn in the development of her thought, when she resumed the sovereignty’s theme, previously addressed in the essays dedicated to Spinoza’s political theology. The momentous conflict between the State and migrants is the central theme investigated in Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration, Polity Press, Cambridge Boston 2020.[2] This book won the Pozzale prize for essays 2018 and the Sila prize for economy and society 2018.[3]

The political-philosophical questions about the strangeness and the myth of identity are instead the topics of the forthcoming Marranos: The Other of the Other, Polity Press, Cambridge Boston 2020.[4]

Recently, she offered a summary of her philosophical positions in the book Sulla vocazione politica della filosofia, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2018.[5] The book was awarded with the price Mimesis Filosofia 2019.[6]

She is member of the Scientific Committee of the Internationale Wittgenstein-Gesellschaft and Wittgenstein-Studien. From 2011 to 2015 she was Vice President of the Martin Heidegger-Gesellschaft, from which she has resigned on 3 March 2015, after the Schwarze Hefte’s publication. She is also member of the Associazione Italiana Walter Benjamin. Since 2016, she is the editor of the book series Filosofia per il XXI secolo for the publishing house Mimesis. Since 2018 she is member of the Consiglio Scientifico e Strategico of the CIR Onlus, Consiglio Italiano per I Rifugiati.

She was visiting professor at several universities: Stiftung-University of Hildesheim (Germany) 2003; Albert-Ludwig Universität in Freiburg (Germany) 2005; Kulturwissenschaftliches Forschungskolleg in Cologne (Germany) 2007. During the winter semester of 2007, she was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University (USA). In 2012, she was Visiting Professor at Department of Languages and Literatures at Brandeis University (USA). On the winter semester of 2006, she was Brockington Visitor at Queen's University (Canada). In 2017, she held a teaching position for one year at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy).